This guide will introduce you to XFce, the popular (CDE-inspired in the past) Unix/X11 graphical environment, and it will give you pointers how to install it.

Looking for something lighter?

In my home office, I have a very powerful workstation/server with a ton of
RAM. It never slows down, no matter what I throw at it! The rest of the
boxes on my network either have adequate hardware for their designated
tasks or have no GUI interface at all. Hence, I have never had to pay
much attention to the resources that my window managers of choice use.

That all changed when I decided to dig out my old laptop and put it to good
use. It's an older Toshiba Ultra Thin that came pre-loaded with Windows 95.
Now, it's a very functional laptop, but it's no power house by any means.
That is to say that it will not easily run Windows versions newer than
Windows 98. Furthermore, the older versions of Windows are a little light
on features. So it's Linux to the rescue.

While Linux provided the right mix of flexibility and feature richness,
I still needed to select a window manager. There is certainly no shortage
of available window managers for Linux, but given my hardware limitations
I had to be very careful with my resources. The lighter ones tend to be so
featureless or unintuitave that productivity is hindered. Some I found to
be so unattractive that it hurt to look at them. On the other hand, many
of the feature rich graphical interfaces are too demanding on the system
resources for older hardware. So, I began my search for a window manager
that met the following four criteria; light on resources, feature rich,
intuitive and good looking.

Does such a window manager exist for Linux?

XFce4 - A pleasant surprise

If you have ever used the CDE graphical interface for UNIX, than XFce
will be like running into an old friend. Although just one of several CDE
clones for Linux, there is something that makes XFce stand out; It keeps
getting better! XFce version 3 was not the prettiest to look at, but it
worked well. The latest version, XFce4, has been completely rewritten,
and it looks great!

The XFce development team seems committed to making a powerful desktop
environment without unnecessarily weighing it down. The result is a very
light, yet full-featured desktop environment that is ideal for systems
unable to handle the heavy loads that most popular desktop environments
place on system resources. It will also likely appeal to people who like
attractive, uncluttered, configurable and extremely responsive desktop
environments.

The current beta version is quite stable and is more than capable of
handling the daily tasks of even the most demanding power users. With
that in mind, I would still caution anyone contemplating the use of a
beta program, of any kind, in a production environment.

The following article documents the installation of XFce4 (rc2) from
binary (RPM) packages. Although this document is specific to SuSE 8.2,
it is, none-the-less, applicable to any KDE based distribution.

Why this document?

Upon installing XFce I found that I had no way to launch it outside of
killing X-windows and starting it from the command line. There are plenty
of threads, HOWTOs and documents written on adding additional window
managers to KDM. Oftentimes these sources are not written in English
and require serious translating, only to find out that they contradict to
each other or are out dated. In the end, you may end up without a working
window manager.

I have spent hours breaking my system following such documents and hours
more fixing it. After the initial install of the Xfce4 RPMs you should be
able to add it to the KDM drop-down window in under five minutes. Even
though this document is titled "Installing XFce4 on SuSE 8.2", it could
serve as a document for adding additional window managers to KDM as well.